Sabine Tan

N.A.

Neoliberalism as phenomenon has been noted for its pervasiveness, persistence and negative impact in society. The uncertainty, pessimism and tension associated with neoliberal societies have found expression in popular culture entertainment, more specifically in dystopic depictions of societies influenced by neoliberal logic. These dystopic present...

Bloomsbury Semiotics offers a state-of-the-art overview of the entire field of semiotics by revealing its influence on a wide range of disciplinary perspectives. With four volumes spanning theory, method and practice across the disciplines, this definitive reference work emphasizes and strengthens common bonds shared across intellectual cultures, a...

This chapter offers a proposal of how a multimodal social semiotic approach based on a multiliteracies paradigm can possibly be used in the Integrating Content and Language in Higher Education (ICLHE) classroom. The multiliteracies paradigm has been shown to be effective at engaging students with its utilization of varied modalities that cater to d...

International education is impacted by multiple discourses, in particular the discourse of university as an educational institution responsible for producing and curating knowledge for the public good, pursuing truth and transforming student life, and the neoliberal marketing discourse which portrays the university as a business organization provid...

Exploring the relationship between theory and practice in Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), this volume offers a state-of-the-art overview of Appliable Linguistics. Featuring both internationally-renowned scholars and rising stars from Argentina, Australia, Austria, Brazil, Chile, Denmark, Indonesia, New Zealand, Singapore and the USA, Appliab...

This paper uses a Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis (SF-MDA) approach to analyse tweets from the Twitter accounts of Presidents Barack Obama (@Barack Obama) and Donald Trump (@realDonaldTrump). The tweets were posted during the last nine months of President Obama’s effective presidency and the first nine months of President Trump’s...

This paper presents the findings from a case study which explores how students engage with learning materials mediated through 360-degree panoramic videos. The case study extends findings from a project which developed an online platform for viewing and annotating 360-degree videos, and for providing data analytics (heatmaps, viewpoint tracking and...

This article investigates the discursive construction of international students on Australian and Chinese university webpages that are directed at international students. The international student theme webpages of three Australian and three Chinese universities were examined in relation to how verbal and visual semiotic resources were co-deployed...

Visual thinking (VT) has potential for dealing with recurring problems in CLIL instruction. • Systemic Functional Multimodal Discourse Analysis facilitates identification of VT features. • Implications relevant for the design of printed and e-learning teaching materials

Multimodality, involving the study of meaning arising from the integration of language with images and other resources in multimodal texts, interactions and events, addresses the fundamental need to understand human communication in the current age of digital technology. However, multimodality is not considered to be a discipline per se at present....

In recent years there has been increased academic and professional interest and awareness in approaches to English language teaching (ELT) that take a plurilingual approach. This is often combined with a multimodal stance. The outcome of this combination is an approach to English language teaching that integrates multiple languages and multiple sem...

The Cambridge Handbook of Systemic Functional Linguistics - edited by Geoff Thompson May 2019

There is a growing interest in the use of visual thinking techniques for promoting conceptual thinking in problem solving tasks as well as for reducing the complexity of ideas expressed in scientific and technical formats. The products of visual thinking, such as sketchnotes, graphics and diagrams, consist of ‘multimodal complexes’ that combine lan...

This paper uses a social semiotic perspective to analyze Donald Trump’s domination of media coverage of the US presidential campaign from 16 June 2015, when he announced his candidacy for nomination as the Republican candidate until 8 November 2016, when he was elected as President of the United States. The paper argues that one of the keys to Dona...

This paper reports on a study that is part of a project which aims to develop a multimodal analytical approach for big data analytics, initially in the context of violent extremism. The findings reported here tested the application of natural language processing models to the text of a sample of articles from the online magazines Dabiq and Rumiyah,...

This study takes a systemic functional multimodal social semiotic approach to the analysis and discussion of image and text relations in two sets of data. First, patterns of contextualisation of images and text in the online magazines Dabiq and Rumiyah produced by the Islamic extremist organisation which refers to itself as Islamic State (referred...

This paper uses a multimodal mixed methods approach for exploring general recontextualisation patterns of violent extremist images in online media. Specifically, the paper reports on the preliminary findings of a preliminary study which investigates various patterns in the reuse of images which appear in ISIS’s official propaganda magazines Dabiq a...

In 2015, the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) was tasked with developing literacy and numeracy skills testing for pre-service teachers. All undergraduate and postgraduate trainee teachers are now required to pass these literacy and numeracy tests at some stage on their journey to becoming a teacher; for commencing students from 20...

Two notable features of the current conflict in Syria and Iraq are the number of foreign fighters from western countries fighting for Sunni militant organisations, and the use of the Internet and social media by some extremist groups to disseminate propaganda material. This article explores how the group which refers to itself as Islamic State and...

Intersemiotic translation is viewed as the basis of cultural communication through which ideas are circulated, translated and explained using language, images and other semiotic resources. From this perspective, intersemiotic translation is conceptualised through the principle of resemiotisation which is concerned with how semiotic choices are tran...

This study employs a multimodal social semiotic approach to the analysis of text and image relations in material produced by the violent extremist organisation known as Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS). The study focuses on iconisation, where meanings are condensed and interpersonally charged through ‘bonding icons’ which embody the organis...

This article presents a mixed methods approach for analysing text and image relations in violent extremist discourse. The approach involves integrating multimodal discourse analysis with data mining and information visualisation, resulting in theoretically informed empirical techniques for automated analysis of text and image relations in large dat...

Multimodality, the study of the interaction of language with other semiotic resources such as images and sound resources, has significant implications for computer assisted language learning (CALL) with regards to understanding the impact of digital environments on language teaching and learning. In this paper, we explore recent manifestations of C...

This study examines the types of verbal, pictorial, and multimodal metaphors in the genre of sex education picture books for young children in Mainland China. Although being an educational discourse genre that is essentially concerned with transmitting scientific facts, sex education picture books employ a range of metaphors that categorize and con...

This paper adopts a multimodal social semiotic approach for exploring the semiotic changes involved in the transformation of a novel into stage and screen productions. It examines how semiotic resources are deployed in each medium through elements of mise-en-scène, such as speech, music, sound, lighting, props, staging, and cinematographic techniqu...

This article demonstrates how a digital environment offers new opportunities for transforming qualitative data into quantitative data in order to use data mining and information visualization for mixed methods research. The digital approach to mixed methods research is illustrated by a framework which combines qualitative methods of multimodal disc...

This study conducts a social semiotic analysis of six sex education picture books for preschool children in the People’s Republic of China. Following van Leeuwen’s framework for analysing the discursive construction of social actors, this paper examines two types of social actors directly associated with the education of human sexuality: the physic...

This paper proposes a pedagogical approach for teaching and learning critical thinking through multimodal analysis – that is, ‘multimodal analysis for critical thinking'. The approach builds on the conviction that students require competencies that move beyond traditional notions of literacy to meet the changing demands posed by media and technolog...

As leadership discourses in higher education are increasingly being mediated online, texts previously reserved for staff are now being made available in the public domain. As such, these texts become accessible for study, critique and evaluation. Additionally, discourses previously confined to the written domain are now increasingly multimodal. Thu...

This exploratory study introduces the systemic approach and the explicit teaching of a meta-language to provide conceptual tools for students for the analysis and interpretation of multimodal texts. Equipping students with a set of specialised vocabulary with conventionalised meanings associated with specific choices in multimodal texts empowers th...

Multimodal learning, as an effective method for helping students to understand complex concepts, has attracted much research interest recently. Using more than one media in the learning process typically makes the study material easier to grasp. In the current study, students annotate linguistic and visual elements in multimodal texts by using geom...

The Bloomsbury Companion to M. A. K. Halliday is a comprehensive and accessible reference resource to one of the world’s leading and most influential linguists. Born in 1925, Halliday is the figure most responsible for the development of systemic functional linguistics (SFL). The impact of his work extends beyond linguistics, into the study of styl...

A "multimodal digital semiotics" approach, involving the development and use of interactive digital media technology, mathematical techniques of analysis and scientific visualization for modeling and analyzing multimodal phenomena, is demonstrated through the analysis of an interview between a climate scientist and a climate denialist on Fox News....

Multimodal Analysis is a branch of Social Semiotics that studies how different resources, such as language, gesture, music, imagery, cinematography, etc. are used in modern media, and by humans in general, to construct and communicate meaning. Though theoretical aspects of multimodal analysis are well developed in the literature, and there is progr...

The present paper discusses issues arising from the use of an interactive digital software tool to analyse multimodal communication. The focus is on the ways in which such technical resources and associated techniques enable the analyst of social semiosis to apply different types of analysis, and provide the site for critical reflection upon the re...

In the 21st century, the field of business and finance has become a media spectacle. Not only have advances in technology changed the ways in which audiences engage with business information, the pervasiveness of internet and cable television networks has led to the emergence of new hybrid forms of business news discourse, blending verbiage, images...

Critical discourse analysts are increasingly required to account for multimodal phenomena constructed through language and other resources (e.g. images, sound and music) and to relate high-level critical insights on the social motivations of these texts to their realizations in low-level expressive phenomena, and vice versa. In this paper, we use i...

This article explores the application of APPRAISAL theory, or more specifically, its subcategory ENGAGEMENT, to the analysis of an internet-based advertising campaign, from the viewpoint of dialogicity, heteroglossia and intertextuality, and its role in positioning readers within the heteroglossic diversity of hypermedia discourse. The author’s clo...

The paper discusses the challenges faced by researchers in developing effective digital interfaces for analyzing the meaning-making processes of multimodal phenomena. The authors propose a social semiotic approach as the underlying theoretical foundation, because interactive digital technology is the embodiment of multimodal social semiotic communi...

List of Illustrations List of Figures List of Tables List of Appendices Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction The World Told and The World Shown. Multisemiosis Issues E.Ventola & A.J.M.Guijarro PART I: MULTIMODAL THEORIES: CODING THE VISUAL Multisemiosis and Context-Based Register Typology: Registerial Variation in The Complementarity...

In this paper we present a collaborative work between computer and social scientists resulting in the development of annotation software for conducting research and analysis in social semiotics in both multimodal and linguistic aspects. The paper describes the proposed software and discusses how this tool can contribute for development of social se...